Arts

Comedian Amy Schumer has been on a roll, recently. Her sketch-comedy show Inside Amy Schumer is both popular and highly acclaimed. Even her professional peers—perhaps the pettiest, bitchiest profession on the planet—heap praise upon it, ...

As titles go for a world-premiere play, I Saw My Neighbor on the Train and I Didn’t Even Smile isn’t promising, but it’s thematically apt. When the piano player enters downstage center and adjusts, slightly, ...

The Magic Flute has and always will be absurd, nonsensical and up for wide interpretation. The Glimmerglass performance of the piece wasn’t designed to change any of this but instead offer modern audiences, youth especially, ...

Voltaire’s Candide is a satire aimed directly at the teachings of philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who preached that our world is the best of all possible worlds that God could have created despite the horrors ...

Deathtrap on the Fitzpatrick Main Stage of Berkshire Theatre Group in Stockbridge has the feel of classic summer stock theatre. Ira Levin’s 1978 play was well-regarded, it’s light and tight (six scenes in two acts ...

It was a tough off-season at Shakespeare and Company: Tony Simotes, 2014 artistic director and founding member of the troupe, “left” and was soon picked up by the Berkshire Theatre Group; the new executive director, ...

One of the best seldom-produced musicals, Bells are Ringing, is getting the full bells-and-whistles treatment at the Colonial by the most ridiculously talented cast and crew artistic director Kate Maguire has ever assembled. It is ...

As Brian Castner and three of his fellow Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialists are driving back to base from yet another mission while deployed in Iraq, the tension of the moment is jolted by a pigeon. ...

Adapted from Vera Brittain’s much-admired, best-selling memoir of World War I, Testament of Youth should be better than it is. Swedish actress Alicia Vikander plays Vera with a flawless British accent and impeccable, lip-trembling emotion, ...

Louis XIV, the Sun King, who made absolute monarchy a divine right, is getting older. And his new palace at Versailles has been under construction for ages, and still isn’t worthy of his absolute divineness. ...

The WTF’s new artistic director, Mandy Greenfield, is boldly setting her own course at the theater that built much of its reputation on reviving classics of American and world theater. Of the eight plays (two ...

Owen Smith, producing artistic director, gave the best criticism for Park Playhouse’s 27th annual production, this year’s Singin’ in the Rain, a 1983 musical based on the immortal MGM 1952 film of the same name ...

When one first encounters David Adkins as Henry David Thoreau on the Unicorn’s dark stage, he is crowing in discordant concert with a rooster, putting one more in anticipation of Peter Pan than the transcendentalist ...

It’s almost insulting to our received images of warfare, this Battle of Agincourt, with a handful of black-clad actors suffering slo-mo agonies while the stage is littered with drapes of red. Since scenes of actual ...

Spoiler alert: The “girl” dies.
The “me” in the title Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann), an awkward high school senior wracked by self-loathing who has worked really hard to ...

The greatest tribute to the power of Claudio Monteverdi’s music (and the damn fine story it set) occurred during the second half of Orfeo, as the title character made his way out of the underworld, ...